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GUY C.WIGGINS
Winter Along Central Park
.
Oil on canvas. 406x508 mm; 16x20 inches.
Signed in oil, lower right recto.
Sold Doyle, NewYork, April 5, 1989, lot
110; private collection.
Wiggins was extremely popular inAmerica
throughout the first half of the 1900s,
aided by his approachable style and his
strong artistic
pedigree.Atthe age of only
20 he was the youngest artist to have a
work included in the collection of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, NewYork.
When he started painting snowy,NewYork
city winter scenes in the mid-1910s his
popularity surged (he claimed to have been
trying to paint a summer landscape, not
able to progress, when he looked out the
window of his studio on a winter day and
decided to paint the row of buildings across
the street blurred by the snow storm).
He moved to Connecticut and purchased
a gentleman’s farm outside of Old Lyme
in the 1920s, though he continued to keep
a studio in NewYork for the next couple
of decades. In 1920,Wiggins established an
eponymous art school in Connecticut,
teaching in New Haven during the “off-
season” and in Old Lyme during the
summer. In 1937, he relocated his art
school year-round to Essex, Connecticut,
and would invite important artists such as
George Luks, Eugene Higgins and Bruce
Crane as visiting instructors during the
summers.Wiggins died at age 79, while on
vacation in St. Augustine, Florida, and is
buried in Old Lyme.
[30,000/50,000]